1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to printers, plotters and other such devices. Specifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods for analyzing print job requirements and estimating printer or plotter resource availability for same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Job length assurance is a feature being designed into state of the art printers, plotters and other devices employing consumable resources. Job length assurance involves: 1) monitoring of printer resources (e.g. toner); 2) analyzing print jobs to estimate the resource requirements for same; and 3) either printing the job or providing an indication of insufficient resources.
Numerous methods are known in the art for determining the amount of resources required for a given print job. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,937,225, issued Aug. 10, 1999 to D. J. Samuels and entitled PIXEL COUNTING TONER OR INK USE MONITOR AND PIXEL COUNTING METHOD FOR MONITORING THE TONER OR INK USE and the references cited therein, the teachings of which are incorporated herein by reference. These references illustrate that conventional techniques for analyzing the print job to estimate resource, particularly toner, requirements require a number of calculations by the printer driver on the computer and/or the printer. For each job, the driver must typically rasterize each of a number of jobs that may be in the queue.
As the number and intensity of the calculations may unduly burden the computer and the printer and delay print and other operations, a need remains in the art for a system or method for analyzing print job requirements more quickly and easily for job length assurance applications.